[Open-access] Global - national scientific information budget

Tue Mar 12 15:59:03 UTC 2013

On 11 March 2013 10:38, Laurent Romary <laurent.romary at inria.fr> wrote:

> Is there a reference document which describes and breaks down (e.g. >subscriptions) the scientific information budgets worldwide and country per >country?

As an academic librarian Heather Morrison has done a fair number of
big picture calculations over the years:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/economics

The most widely cited economic studies are by Houghton, gathered here:

http://www.cfses.com/projects/Easi-OA.htm

and Alma Swan repeated Houghton’s methods in the UK in Feb 2010:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/programmerelated/2010/howtoopenaccess.aspx

Mike Taylor wrote various articles about this time last year which
also tried to address the big financial picture, among them:

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/31858/title/Opinion--Academic-Publishing-Is-Broken-/

Less big picture, but equally indicative of just where the money goes
in paywall publishing was Richard Smith's blog post, in which he
remarked that the "editors were being taken for suckers and exploited
more cruelly than the people working in fast food joints":

http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2012/07/03/richard-smith-medical-journals-a-gaggle-of-golden-geese/

an article that certainly reminded me that the heart of that fat crook
Robert Maxwell's business empire was the academic publisher Pergamon
Press.

So why is the information you seek hard to come by?

At the heart of modern business are two dark secrets, both guarded
intensely close to players' chests: what the customer is willing to
pay, and the various components that compose a price. That is why
publishers oblige libraries to keep their journal bundle prices
confidential, and that is why such pricing information can be hard to
come by as we try to estimate how much it would take to make the
world's scientific literature freely available so that all may benefit
from it.

I'm sure everyone would be interested to read the results from an
anonymous survey that enabled librarians to unburden themselves of the
secret knowledge in these commercial confidentiality agreements...

Maybe this would be something the OKFN could take on? Or indeed INRIA?

Je vous souhaite une très bonne continuation,

D.
-- 
Douglas Carnall
dougie.carnall at gmail.com

http://cabinetbeezer.info

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